There are a few loose ends to sew up from yesterday.
The ancients largely shared Adams belief that human nature played a huge part in our moral character and likewise concluded that any approach to morality that ignored human nature could only be a monstrous travesty. Where Adams differs is the ease with which he accepts that our human nature creates a steady state.
We did no such thing of course.
I was an athlete when I was in my early twenties and I spent approximately five hours a day training. In addition to being a full-time athlete, I paid the bills by working two part time jobs: sailing instructor at a yacht club and bouncer at a trendy dance club. The number of women I met in those years who were deeply interested in men who behaved like unrestrained horny animals was stunning. (All of which suggests to me that men's natural instincts complement those of women better than Adams realizes.)
But even I in the face of all that temptation was smart enough to grasp at the time that this wasn't a good long-term prospect for happiness. And this isn't false humility: the twenty year old Jules was not exactly a genius when it came to weighing the respective merits of short-term gratification versus long-term happiness.
We have instincts and those instincts do restrict the options open to us. But even at twenty though I could see that while my free will was much less free than the nuns had taught me at high school because of natural desires and instincts, I also saw that human nature didn't restrict my options down to only one choice or even just a few choices. There were all sorts of options available to me. Most importantly, I could see that we have some influence on the person we become. We can choose to cultivate some desires over others just as we can shape and prune a tree to grow into a certain form.
(An aside: the degree to which women, especially young women, reciprocate male desires is painfully obvious these days. I live in the neighbourhood adjoining a university campus where the ration of women to men is something 60 to 40. Watching the girls from campus I can see many of them discovering the hard way that their need for male approval is so strong that they will repeatedly go to extraordinary lengths to get sex.)
Playboy versus Weiner
Adams' examples of Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner are interesting in that both made astonishingly bad choices and now have to live with the consequences. Both make good scandals in that they are rather pathetic characters we can enjoy laughing at without feeling a lot of pity for either. They are not interesting moral characters from whom we can reasonably draw general moral conclusions. There is one notable difference between the two however.
The thing that the ancients would have insisted on, and not a few moderns would agree, is that our character doesn't just happen to us. They would insist that our character is the consequence of habits that we partly allow to become ingrained and partly cultivate. They would say, for example, that the life habits Hefner developed between the end of his first marriage in 1959 and the start of his second marriage in 1988 had a lot to do with his failure at that second marriage.
They would insist that living a life is a lot like training for a sport. Yes, natural factors play a role. If you are four feet, eight inches tall, no amount of training is going to make you a great basketball player. But natural aptitudes only create opportunities that have to be developed. Hefner is a like a guy who spend his whole life training for some sport and when he was forced to abandon that sport discovered that he had failed to develop any broader interests to base his life on.
Hefner is also about a pure an example of Enlightenment morality as you will find. He didn't think the almost three decades of character formation between the two marriages would affect the chances of his success. He thought that all that mattered was that he make a rational choice to get married.
Weiner is much more pathetic. It's not just that a man in his mid forties had such poor impulse control, it's that he got so little for it. He ruined his life for a sex scandal in which he didn't get any actual sex! Unlike Hefner who willfully cultivated his character, Weiner just sort of drifted into his.
When he was caught he acted like a guilty criminal. He always knew he was a loser; he thought he could hide it.
If you had the choice, better to be a Hefner than a Weiner. (Yes, I know better to be neither.0
But you may not have the choice. A certain amount of luck, a certain amount of talent and an awful lot of hard work and sacrifice went into making Hugh Hefner into Hugh Hefner. I might sneer at someone who becomes the world' greatest slide whistle virtuoso but I shouldn't fool myself into thinking that I could easily do the same. What Hefner achieved was not easy.
But, whatever our limitations we can do better than Weiner. Any jerk could do what Weiner did.
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?So writes Scott Adams. Things just drifted in that direction? The end result of centuries of western civilization is just a bizarre fluke?
The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.
The ancients largely shared Adams belief that human nature played a huge part in our moral character and likewise concluded that any approach to morality that ignored human nature could only be a monstrous travesty. Where Adams differs is the ease with which he accepts that our human nature creates a steady state.
But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.As any feminist would (correctly) point out, men have had an awful lot to do with the form our society takes so it would be odd that we had somehow played a part in loading the game against ourselves.
We did no such thing of course.
I was an athlete when I was in my early twenties and I spent approximately five hours a day training. In addition to being a full-time athlete, I paid the bills by working two part time jobs: sailing instructor at a yacht club and bouncer at a trendy dance club. The number of women I met in those years who were deeply interested in men who behaved like unrestrained horny animals was stunning. (All of which suggests to me that men's natural instincts complement those of women better than Adams realizes.)
But even I in the face of all that temptation was smart enough to grasp at the time that this wasn't a good long-term prospect for happiness. And this isn't false humility: the twenty year old Jules was not exactly a genius when it came to weighing the respective merits of short-term gratification versus long-term happiness.
We have instincts and those instincts do restrict the options open to us. But even at twenty though I could see that while my free will was much less free than the nuns had taught me at high school because of natural desires and instincts, I also saw that human nature didn't restrict my options down to only one choice or even just a few choices. There were all sorts of options available to me. Most importantly, I could see that we have some influence on the person we become. We can choose to cultivate some desires over others just as we can shape and prune a tree to grow into a certain form.
(An aside: the degree to which women, especially young women, reciprocate male desires is painfully obvious these days. I live in the neighbourhood adjoining a university campus where the ration of women to men is something 60 to 40. Watching the girls from campus I can see many of them discovering the hard way that their need for male approval is so strong that they will repeatedly go to extraordinary lengths to get sex.)
Playboy versus Weiner
Adams' examples of Hugh Hefner and Anthony Weiner are interesting in that both made astonishingly bad choices and now have to live with the consequences. Both make good scandals in that they are rather pathetic characters we can enjoy laughing at without feeling a lot of pity for either. They are not interesting moral characters from whom we can reasonably draw general moral conclusions. There is one notable difference between the two however.
The thing that the ancients would have insisted on, and not a few moderns would agree, is that our character doesn't just happen to us. They would insist that our character is the consequence of habits that we partly allow to become ingrained and partly cultivate. They would say, for example, that the life habits Hefner developed between the end of his first marriage in 1959 and the start of his second marriage in 1988 had a lot to do with his failure at that second marriage.
They would insist that living a life is a lot like training for a sport. Yes, natural factors play a role. If you are four feet, eight inches tall, no amount of training is going to make you a great basketball player. But natural aptitudes only create opportunities that have to be developed. Hefner is a like a guy who spend his whole life training for some sport and when he was forced to abandon that sport discovered that he had failed to develop any broader interests to base his life on.
Hefner is also about a pure an example of Enlightenment morality as you will find. He didn't think the almost three decades of character formation between the two marriages would affect the chances of his success. He thought that all that mattered was that he make a rational choice to get married.
Weiner is much more pathetic. It's not just that a man in his mid forties had such poor impulse control, it's that he got so little for it. He ruined his life for a sex scandal in which he didn't get any actual sex! Unlike Hefner who willfully cultivated his character, Weiner just sort of drifted into his.
When he was caught he acted like a guilty criminal. He always knew he was a loser; he thought he could hide it.
If you had the choice, better to be a Hefner than a Weiner. (Yes, I know better to be neither.0
But you may not have the choice. A certain amount of luck, a certain amount of talent and an awful lot of hard work and sacrifice went into making Hugh Hefner into Hugh Hefner. I might sneer at someone who becomes the world' greatest slide whistle virtuoso but I shouldn't fool myself into thinking that I could easily do the same. What Hefner achieved was not easy.
But, whatever our limitations we can do better than Weiner. Any jerk could do what Weiner did.
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